It's the rare history book that offers first-person knowledge combined with an understanding of the grander context in which the events depicted took place, but we have such a unique confluence in this 1919 book. Jesse May, born into a family of Midwest abolitionists and a Quaker noncombatant during the Civil War, grew up to become a respected historian and political scientist, and he brings his unusual perspective on slavery and abolition in America to this concise, clear-headed survey. From an expurgated tidbit condemning slavery in an early draft of the Declaration of Independence to the particular power of women in the antislavery movement, Macy's work is a brief but devastating argument about hypocrisy, democracy, and freedom in America in the mid-19th century.

American political scientist JESSE MACY (1842-1919) was a professor at Grinnell College. He wrote extensively on political, social, and civic matters.

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